[ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases?

Tue Jun 30 23:10:40 UTC 2020

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2020 3:49 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases?

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 3:55 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

> It really surprises me this is so controversial. 

It does?!!

> We already know how to take blood from a patient, do something to it (such as dialysis) then put it back in.  Seems like we could even modify an existing dialysis machine with something as simple as a UV source around a glass tube somewhere within.  Then we get to see if the covid dialysis patients recover better on those machines retrofitted with UV recover better than those whose machines do not have that retrofit. 

For goodness sake Spike, if the UV light is intense enough to kill a virus it's more than intense enough to scramble the genetic code inside human blood cells that, unlike skin cells, never evolved pigment to protect them from UV because they were never exposed to them before. To put it more simply, doing what you suggest would be carcinogenic. Killing the COVID-19 virus is super easy and so is killing cancer cells, the hard part is to kill them without also killing or mutating human cells.

John K Clark

OK so here we go, no worries (or rather low worries): red blood cells have no nucleus, so DNA damage doesn’t apply to them.  Leucocytes are produced in bone marrow, so those are renewable.  Lymphocytes cannot divide enough times such that a weird DNA damaging UV dose would matter.  In any case, granulocytes, monocytes and lymphocytes depend on bone marrow to renew their numbers.  So we UV the covid at a low enough dose to destroy them, let their wrecked remains trigger the immune response in the remaining intact system.

In any case, that approach sounds promising to me.  The bone marrow will not know or care if there are DNA damaged white blood cells floating around in there.  In blood recipients there are already leucocytes from someone else, but that doesn’t cause cancer as far as I know.

Considering we perform those Hail Mary plays with the respirators, I would think it would be worth the risk to try to UV irradiate blood in dialysis patients, and it doesn’t really cost them anything: they already hafta come in there a coupla times a week anyway.  Low risk, low cost, high potential payoff if it works.  Then if it does work, we already know what to do for the non-dialysis covid patients.

That scenario isn’t a no-worries, but rather a low-worries, lower than the danger of covid, and it might work.

spike

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